While at the Eclipse Runtime Summit, I had the chance to talk with Iona's Eric Newcomer (CTO of Iona, Co-Chair, Enterprise Expert Group, OSGi Alliance, and well respected enterprise coding guy) about the emergence of OSGi as a server-side, or enterprise technology.

We discuss how OSGi came to be a technology of interest in the enterprise space, and move on to the formation of the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group. Eric goes through a high level list of what the "enterprise" here means: mostly the usual suspects of security, adding distributed functionality, messaging, scalability, and performance.

I ask Eric about the process that the OSGi Alliance uses and we discuss the interesting role of the full time spec writer that the OSGi Alliance uses. As Eric outlines, there's a process pretty similar to the JCP process, where the deliverables are a specification, a reference implementation, and TCKs to verify implementations.

We then discuss the overall idea of componentizing Java – what OSGi bundles and modules seek to do. As the Java world is pretty well split between Sun and OSGi's ambitions here, we touch on Eric's thoughts there and a little bit of the historic background between the two parties.

Finally, we end up with a rough road-map for the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group and Eric's thoughts on the Eclipse Runtime Summit we'd both just attended.

Thanks again to Eric for the interview ;>

Disclaimer: Eclipse is a client and sponsored this video. Iona is also a client.

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Continuing the Discussion

[…] People Over Process » Enterprise OSGi, a Discussion with Eric Newcomer – While at the Eclipse Runtime Summit, I had the chance to talk with Iona’s Eric Newcomer (CTO of Iona, Co-Chair, Enterprise Expert Group, OSGi Alliance, and well respected coding guy) about the emergence of OSGi as a server-side, or enterprise technology […]

[…] The inclusion of companies like Nokia, Nortel and Ericsson in OSGi’s members list hints at the origins of OSGi: initially created as a platform to be used in home automation (R1 and R2), it has been used in vehicle automation (R3), mobile devices and the Eclipse Project (R4). The Java enterprise community has also started to take notice, with interest growing especially in the past two years. OSGi history and the new enterprise interest are discussed in an interview with Peter Kriens. In response to the newly emerging usage, OSGi has formed the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group (EEG). Enterprise requirements such as distributed environments, additional security and messaging are investigated in this group and will be part of the next release of OSGi. The history of OSGi is addressed again, as well as the formation of the EEG, in an interview with EEG co-chair Eric Newcomer. […]

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Tweet I no longer work at RedMonk. Please see my last post for more info. I don’t quite understand how someone so geeky can be so interesting but Michael Coté at RedMonk manages it, and with a suitable dash of skepticism too! —Rob “The IT Skeptic” England I’m Cote’, a software Industry Analyst with RedMonk. […]more →